|
|
| Reviews |
| |
A Mystical Merger of Traditions, Past and Present
By ALASTAIR MACAULAY
Published: August 24, 2008
|
The difference between dance and dance! It never fails to amaze me how some complex and extensive pieces, involving plenty of sincerity, craft and impeccable sociopolitical intentions, leave my senses and mind nonetheless numb, as if nothing was happening onstage. Then along comes another performer in another work, and the merest detail - a step, a shift of weight - becomes galvanizing, intoxicating.
 |
Richard Termine for The New York Times
|
| The Erasing Borders festival included “Ardhanarishwara,” a tribute to an androgynous deity, performed at the Ailey Citigroup Theater. |
So it was often in the final two performances of Erasing Borders, the new festival of Indian dance. These took place in the Ailey Citigroup Theater, and it was too bad that the last half of Thursday’s closing performance comprised the three dreariest works of the festival.
Contrasting shades of dreary, to be sure. MariaColacoDance’s “Sath Safed (Work in progress),” about carpet weavers from Kashmir, mixing modern dance (lots) and traditional Indian Odissi (a smidgen), was a gray, tepidly predictable skein of all-female weight-taking and mutual supportiveness.
Ananya Dance Theater Company’s “Daak” (or “Call to Action”), intensely earnest and earnestly intense, mixed Indian and modern-dance styles in equal measure. The work claims to be “an artistic response to historical and continuing land rights violations,” from the “native communities here in Minnesota to ‘special economic zones’ in West Bengal” to the maquiladora assembly plants of Tijuana, Mexico. And certainly there was a great deal of suffering on show. This is the second in Ananya’s “trilogy on environmental justice,” and I intend to avoid the other two.
Sinha Danse’s “Quebasian Rhapsody,” blending ballet, Bharatanatyam and modern dance, was strenuously energetic and projected little but its own tension. Roger Sinha, its choreographer and one of its two performers, has carefully selected a tempo and vocabulary that inexorably show how physically ill-suited he is to this kind of thing. This and the preceding two dances passed like a long dirge.
Fortunately Wednesday’s performance and the first half of Thursday’s had rich compensations. And there was much to be learned. In a panel discussion on Wednesday one choreographer said that some of the movements in her works that had been assumed to be most influenced by modern dance were in fact the most traditional (“3,000 years old”).
I had found two of the male dancers in the Rudrakshya troupe exaggeratedly effeminate, but a program note explained that the company’s Odissi style has traditionally been performed by women only, and that its work “Ardhanarishwara” “explores dimensions of the primordial androgyne.” (The aspects that bothered me were not, I suspect, primordial.)
And Sudarshan Belsare, whom I, while watching, had decided was a woman, turns out, in the program, to be “a trans performer,” perpetuating the “classical tradition of Stri-Vesham (female impersonation), where the target gender identity of a woman’s psyche and body is the medium to communicate Nayaki Bhava (the voice of the female protagonist) in the traditional Bharatanatyam repertory.” He is based in Boston, and his “Carmine Bees” solo, a tour de force, brought the house down. So yes: borders are being erased.
If there was one step that haunts me most, it was when the three Rudrakshya men - fastidious stylists - each simply extended one foot along the floor. This didn’t even involve a transfer of weight onto that foot, but they did it - more than once - as if it prompted a switch of balance throughout the body. The pelvis shifted emphatically from one side to another, the shoulders did too, and the head, neck and one raised arm realigned themselves accordingly. Then they brought the foot, and the whole body, straight back into the original position. A tiny thing, they made it an event of serious, sensuous consequence.
And there were many such events that these Rudrakshya men (from the east Indian state of Orissa), performing “Ardhanarishwara” with one woman under the aegis of the Nayikas Dance Theater of New York, made matter. (Their sustained balances!) No dancers throughout the festival showed more astonishing details of the fingering that is among Indian dance’s most celebrated glories.
In some passages individual fingers were bent while others were straight, and another time each man brandished one hand with the thumb holding the little finger, while splaying the three central fingers and vibrating the middle and fourth fingers only. (Just try it - it’s not unlike the exercise pianists do to develop articulation in trills.)
I was left of two minds. The three men’s very stylishness seemed a somewhat pointed end in itself (the woman often seemed just a happy handmaid to these three virtuosos). Yet the elaborate, engrossing choreography, by Myna Mukherjee and Bichitrananda Swain, really did state an absorbing view of harmony within male-female and human-divine principles.
In “Carmine Bees” Mr. Belsare was often overinsistent. Even so, his long solo dance was an extraordinary achievement, passing through many engrossing features of arm gesture, footwork, head movement, hand vibrations, always with some true sense of repose and at the same time with a gripping purposefulness from first to last. His solo, apparently based on aspects of the Buddhist goddess Kurukulla, addressed aspects of femininity (notably with gestures indicating breasts) but, driven by its own momentum, became a true act of transcendence and religious immersion.
Having loved Sampradaya Dance Creations in Tuesday’s lunchtime recital at Chase Manhattan Plaza, I was delighted to see these Toronto dancers on Wednesday in another piece, “Shunya,” and to admire their integrity as an ensemble, their shared rhythmic acuity. The group’s choreographer, Lata Pada, understands how to give an overall rhythmic shape to even this more experimentally modern piece. Contrasts abound (up-down, bent-straight, in-out), and energy accumulates. Later it was a surprise to hear her say that she had choreographed the work in silence, then spent three weeks working with her composer, Praveen D. Rao; music and dance felt tightly married.
Also on Wednesday, Parul Shah danced a “Chasing Shadows” solo that brought the house down. Her sources are splendidly hybrid: contemporary dance, the Kathak technique of north India, the female temple-court artists of south India. They are, in fact, her subject. You could feel what her program note stated, “the inner struggle of a woman who wants to move forward but cannot because her shadows are not only her past but the only identity she knows.”
On Thursday Dr. Janaki Rangarajan’s solo “Ranganjali,” also in Bharatanatyam style, an invocatory exercise in praise of Lord Shiva that combined pure dance (Nrtta) and expressive mime (Abhinaya), was another spellbinder, with multiple body parts, from eyes to feet, all actively engaged, playing separate parts in building to a crescendo. Stillness - a sudden, seemingly unprepared but sustained balance - is a central ingredient. Here, as in all the best forms of Indian dance, we feel many layers of being: past and present, action and stasis, self-sufficiency and outward communication, pride and humility.
|
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/25/arts/dance/25batt.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ei=5070&emc=eta1
|
|
